Review article of Bernard Davies’ (2024) book, “Youth Work Policies in England 2019–2023: Can Open Youth Work Survive?”

Bernard Davies is widely regarded as the leading historian of youth work in the United Kingdom. With over sixty years of involvement in the youth work field, spanning open youth club work, detached and outreach practice, and lecturing on qualifying courses for youth workers, he brings unparalleled depth of field to his scholarship. His three-volume History of the Youth Service in England (1999a; 1999b; 2008) remains the definitive account of how the youth service developed, expanded, and was challenged. His subsequent books, including Austerity, Youth Policy and the Deconstruction of the Youth Service in England (Davies, 2019) and the most recent volume, Youth Work Policies in England 2019–2023: Can Open Youth Work Survive? (Davies, 2024), have continued to document and analyse policy developments as they unfold — making him an indispensable, sometimes lone, voice in holding the state accountable for what has been done to youth provision in England. His work is notable not only for its scholarly rigour but for its consistent political commitment to young people’s rights and to a form of practice that places their needs, interests, and agency at its centre.

Davies’s (2024) book is an important document of record for a turbulent five-year period in English youth work. Building on its 2019 predecessor, it tracks how neo-liberal ideology, continuing austerity, the pandemic, the cost-of-living crisis, and an increasingly problem-focused conception of ‘youth work’ combined to erode open access provision. His core concern is the survival of what he calls ‘open youth work’ — provision rooted in young people’s voluntary participation, trusting relationships, and holistic development — as opposed to state-directed programmes aimed at compliance or deficit-correction. The book is well evidenced, readable, and politically clear-eyed. As a policy resource, it is genuinely valuable.

It is therefore striking that Davies’s (2024) book does not appear to have been widely reviewed or seriously engaged with across the youth work sector since its publication. No substantial responses have appeared in Youth & Policy, Children and Young People Now, or the broader social policy literature. This relative silence may reflect the fragmented, financially precarious and weakened state of the sector’s institutional infrastructure, journals, networks, university departments, and professional bodies with genuine reach that would historically have debated such a text. The erosion Davies documents has, paradoxically, diminished the sector’s capacity to respond to his own analysis of that erosion. There may therefore be a greater interest from the National Youth Agency and UK Youth, for example, in taking a deep dive into what can be learned here. If the lessons of this book are to help future policy, they must be actively translated into briefings for commissioners and local authority officers, into parliamentary submissions, and into the strategic plans of sector bodies. The absence of visible engagement with Davies’s (2024) work to date makes that translation task more urgent, not less. Those working at the intersection of youth work and race equality have a particular responsibility to ensure that this evidence base is put to work in the policy spaces where it matters most. Those who are working at the intersection are rarely working within these bodies but need to knock on the door.

The specific experience of Black and Muslim communities is not a sustained analytical thread. This is not unique to Davies — it reflects a broader silence in the youth work and youth policy literature. The Demos report ‘Inside the Mind of a 16-Year-Old’ (Gamote and Hyman, 2025), which drew on workshops with over 700 young people in towns and cities, including Oldham, Birmingham, and Newham, which have large Black and Muslim populations, similarly offers no analysis disaggregated by faith or ethnicity. That invisibility in research becomes invisibility in policy, and understanding the structural causes of this silence is essential for shaping future policy direction. Davies simply provides a mirror to its absence.

Davies (2024) does acknowledge race in passing. He notes widening structural inequalities linked to class, gender, and race under Conservative governments; recording the participation Black and Minority Ethnic background young people in the National Citizenship Service; and documents the #iwill campaign’s stated aspiration to include young people from low-income and Black and ethnic minority groups. In his critique of how ‘youth work’ was redefined toward violence reduction, school attainment, and mental health, he implicitly flags a racialised dimension. These were the programmes concentrated in urban, deprived areas with high Black and Muslim populations. But the book does not ask the sharper question: not what happened to open youth work in general, but what happened specifically and disproportionately to youth work with and for Black and Muslim communities?

The causes of that absence are structural, not accidental: they flow from austerity’s unequal geography, the racialisation of the ‘youth problem’, the commissioning model’s structural bias, and the collapse of a diverse workforce pipeline. Addressing it requires explicit, targeted, and sustained policy action: data that names race and faith rather than obscuring it; funding structures that reach community-rooted organisations; a policy rationale that develops rather than surveils Black and Muslim young people; and a workforce that reflects the communities it serves. These are not supplementary measures — they are necessary conditions for any future youth work policy that takes its own stated values seriously.

The next chapter

The publication by DCMS of Youth Matters: Your National Youth Strategy (HM Government, 2025) represents the first dedicated national strategy in nearly two decades, with the National Youth Agency playing a central role in its development and delivery. It represents the most significant opportunity in a generation to reverse the damage Davies so carefully documents. The strategy is ambitious in scale: over £500 million of investment, up to 250 new or refurbished youth centres, 50 Young Futures Hubs, and a ten-year commitment to ensuring every young person has access to a trusted adult, a safe space, and a meaningful community (HM Government, 2025). It explicitly acknowledges that the previous decade’s cuts saw youth spending fall by 73%, more than 1,000 youth centres close, and 4,500 youth worker roles disappear, the very figures Davies traces in forensic detail. In that sense, the strategy reads the damage correctly (Weavers, 2025). The critical question is whether its proposed remedies will reach the communities that lost the most.

The Strategy’s treatment of race, ethnicity, and faith gives reason for caution. While it acknowledges that young people from ‘certain ethnic groups’ are among those less likely to have a trusted adult outside the home, one may reasonably ask, trusted by whom?  There is no sustained race equity framework embedded in its design, and the specific situation of Muslim young people receives no dedicated attention. If the NYA and DCMS are serious about this strategy delivering for all young people, race and faith equity must be embedded as core design principles in commissioning frameworks, workforce plans, and data requirements, not as equality monitoring footnotes but by paying particular attention to Black and Muslim communities. These communities’ relationship with state youth provision has too often been defined by suspicion rather than trust, and by control rather than collaboration. Instead, policy should learn from historic precedents rather than working from a deliberate historic amnesia made possible by the ‘we consulted with young people’ activity. Treating any new policy as beginning rather than a continuation.

The case for giving Muslim young people specific attention within that broader delivery framework rests on several distinct grounds. First, compounded disadvantage: Muslim communities in England are among the most economically deprived of any faith group, with high rates of poverty, unemployment, and overcrowded housing concentrated in precisely the urban areas where open youth work provision has been most severely cut (Hussain and Sherif, 2014, MCB, 2025). Second, Muslim young people have been subjected to a specific and sustained policy intervention — the Prevent counter-terrorism strategy — that has no direct parallel for any other group. Prevent did not simply fail youth work in Muslim communities; it actively sought to reposition youth workers, teachers, and community practitioners as agents of surveillance, fundamentally damaging the trust relationships upon which open youth work depends (Smith, 2004). Third, the faith dimension of Muslim identity means that competent youth work cannot be delivered through a race lens alone; it requires practitioners with an understanding of the impact of Islamophobia and the role that Muslim identity plays in young people’s lives (Sayyid and Vakil, 2010; All-Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims, 2018). For Muslim young Muslims, their faith is not something they turn to on a proverbial ‘rainy day’; it is something that they are asked to defend, interpret, represent, explain and be apologetic about. And many turn to it for solace, purpose and connection when all other connections feel lost or inadequate.

At the same time, this case for specific focus must be held alongside an important caution: Muslim communities in England are not homogeneous. They encompass Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Somali, Arab, Turkish, English, and many other communities, each with distinct cultural traditions, languages, migration histories, class and experiences of disadvantage and opportunity.

A policy framework that treats ‘Muslim young people’ as a single category risks reproducing precisely the kind of aggregate thinking that flattens differences within communities and produces provision that fits none of them well. The appropriate response is not a single ‘Muslim youth work’ programme, but a commissioning and workforce framework that is faith-literate, community/neighbourhood-specific, and class-literate, built on partnerships with Muslim-led youth work organisations that already understand the particular communities they serve. The specificity of focus is justified; the homogeneity of response is not.

Whose trusted adult?

The National Youth Strategy’s central promise that every young person should have access to a trusted adult outside the home contains a significant structural tension when considered in relation to Muslim communities. The Prevent counter-terrorism duty, which remains in force, has spent over a decade creating pressures that complicate the conditions under which trust between adults and young people can develop. Youth workers, teachers, and community practitioners in Muslim settings are subject to a mandatory reporting duty that requires them to identify and refer signs of radicalisation to the authorities. The professional and relational consequences are real: the trusted adult, the figure that the Strategy now places at its centre, risks being perceived or experienced, in Muslim community contexts, as a potential agent of state surveillance. Many skilled youth workers found ways to work around Prevent in practice, maintaining professional integrity, protecting confidentiality where they could, and sustaining trust with young people, and this ‘creative positioning’ needs to be acknowledged. But in doing so, they left themselves exposed to an uncomfortable question about compliance and ‘sides’: a youth worker who prioritised the relationship over the reporting duty risked being read as non-compliant, as taking the young person’s side against an employer, or as failing in their statutory obligation to protect the public. The structural problem, in other words, was not only what Prevent did to young people, but what it did to practitioners — placing them in a position where professional ethics and legal duty pointed in opposite directions, and where the very act of being a good youth worker could become grounds for suspicion. This is one of the reasons why Muslim Youth workers that I have listened to for a separate piece of work have expressed a sense of working without backup.

Young people who are aware of the duty, and many are, have rational grounds for self-censorship, for withholding aspects of their faith identity, political views, or personal struggles from the very adults who should be most able to help them. As Qurashi (2018) has argued, the result is a ‘chilling effect’ that extends well beyond individuals directly affected by Prevent referrals, shaping how communities relate to services and how young people understand the boundaries of what is safe to say and to whom. Rebuilding trust requires an explicit policy commitment to separating youth work from counter-terrorism functions, restoring the professional confidentiality and ethical independence of youth workers, and actively engaging Muslim-led youth work organisations in the co-design of local provision — not as delivery partners for government-defined outcomes, but as co-authors of what good youth work looks like in their communities.

In my book (Khan 2013), I offer a definition of Muslim youth work that captures what this should mean in practice: it is concerned with ‘creating safe spaces for Muslim young people to explore personal, social, spiritual, and political choices’. Every one of those terms – safety, exploration, personal, social, spiritual, political – represents a value that Prevent has made more difficult to protect. This critique now has independent authoritative support: the Independent Commission on UK Counter-Terrorism Law, Policy and Practice (2025) concluded that Prevent is based on a ‘flawed radicalisation model’ and recommended it be replaced by a broader, multi-agency safeguarding framework — precisely the structural separation that open youth work with Muslim communities requires

While the above definition captures what open youth work with Muslim communities should be, Davies’s (2024) analysis documents why it so rarely was. Central to that practice is the youth worker who approaches the work from a considered understanding of the contemporary experience of Muslim young people, not as a fixed cultural profile, but as a living political and social reality and who seeks intentional interventions that build agency in individuals, and in the groups and communities they belong to. That combination of understanding and intent is what distinguishes youth work. It is precisely the Prevent framework and the broader repurposing of youth work toward compliance, outcomes, and deficit-correction that Davies (2024) documents as being undermined.

A universalism that sees everybody and then nobody

The Youth Strategy arrives at a particular moment in the history of Muslim young people’s relationship with the state. For more than two decades, Big P Politics — formal legislation, counter-terrorism policy, and the institutional architecture of Prevent and even community cohesion has positioned Muslim young people as objects of the political gaze more so than participants within it. They have not been absent from political life; they have been its subject matter. Muslim identity has been foregrounded by the state, not by choice, but as a risk variable to be monitored, a cultural formation to be interrogated, a demographic to be managed. The result, as Turner and Khan (2025) identify in the Goldsmiths Muslim Youth Futures report, is a generation that experiences a profound paradox: surveilled but not seen. Hyper-present in the policy imagination as a security concern, yet largely absent from the spaces where decisions about their lives are actually made.

Yet Muslim young people are far from politically disengaged. Their politics — small p politics — are alive and immediate: the question of what justice looks like, the weight of Islamophobia in everyday institutions (Sayyid and Vakil, 2010), and solidarity with communities they identify with globally. Turner and Khan (2025) note that events such as the Gaza conflict and the Southport riots ‘intensified trauma and anxiety, yet schools and institutions provided minimal aftercare or support.’ This is the political reality the Youth Strategy must reckon with: world events that foreground Muslim identity in ways young people did not choose, met by institutional silence from the very spaces that should provide support and the space to make meaning. A youth worker who arrives already pre-coded through Prevent, and with the downloads provided by the Islamophobia industry, cannot simply declare themselves a trusted adult and expect to be received as one. Muslim young people are not waiting to be invited into politics. They are already living it, in the register of justice, solidarity, belonging, and loss. The question is whether the Youth Strategy creates provisions that can meet them there.

The recent riots in Belfast (June 2026) have moved reactionary far-right demonstrations to what many have described as pogroms — and have reawakened in the Irish imagination at least a living memory of communities and families burned out of their homes during the Troubles. For Muslim communities in Belfast, that memory is not merely historical. It is a present warning about what happens when the state fails to arrive in time, and when institutional silence is read as permission. The trusted adult the Youth Strategy promises must be able to hold history — not as background context, but as part of the political reality and the imaginative world young people bring with them into every room. What young people carry is not only what they know. It is what they can picture.

The mental health dimension adds further urgency. The King’s Trust TK Maxx Youth Index 2025 (King’s Trust, 2025), drawing on a survey of over 4,000 young people across the UK, found that happiness and confidence among young people have flatlined at an all-time low, with economic uncertainty leaving many feeling hopeless about the future. For Muslim young people, these pressures interact with additional structural barriers. The Caring for Every Child report (Muslim Mind Collaborative, 2025) identify a landscape of compounding gaps: limited cultural and faith literacy across statutory services, a shortage of Muslim professionals in clinical and leadership roles, and a pervasive discomfort with addressing faith in secular settings such as CAMHS. These are not peripheral concerns — they are structural barriers that prevent Muslim young people from accessing support that should be most available to them.

A Youth Strategy that takes wellbeing seriously must recognise that faith is not a complication to be managed around, but a resource to be incorporated. It must also recognise that trust cannot be rebuilt through a competing institutional infrastructure that has historically surveilled Muslim communities and viewed them with suspicion with one hand and service with the other.

That responsibility does not rest with the government alone. British Muslims are the UK’s most generous community, donating £2.2 billion annually — four times the national average (Al-Fagih and Siyech, 2025). Historically, much of that giving has flowed outward, beyond the UK. The result is a domestic infrastructure gap: open youth provision, faith-sensitive mental health services, and community-led spaces remain chronically underfunded, even as young Muslims need them most.

As the Muslim charitable and philanthropic sector turns its attention to this domestic gap, the intent behind that shift deserves serious engagement. What is less clear is whether the sector has the strategic ambition and, just as importantly, the internal collaboration to match the scale of need. There may be signs of a shift already underway: away from acting as a gap-filler for a state that has ‘misread’ the community, and towards a more deliberate strategy that listens to and incorporates subject expertise, rather than relying on lived experience alone. But they may just stay signs.

That last point matters. David Cameron’s Big Society agenda (2010) called on civil society to fill the gaps left by a retreating state — an idea that was always more compelling as rhetoric than as policy, and one that placed a disproportionate burden on the communities least resourced to respond. Lived experience is not enough; strategy and expertise have to do the rest.

The National Youth Agency will point to a diverse range of young people consulted in the Strategy’s development. But diversity of representation is not the same as engagement with political reality. The test is not whether Muslim young people were in the room, but whether the political conditions that shaped their experience (the surveillance logic of Prevent, the trust deficit it created, the structural absence of faith-related provision) are honestly addressed by what comes out of it. Consultation is not just about the optics of representation. What the young people at the centre of this review require is something harder: policy that takes their political and social reality seriously.

The claims of youth work make us all matter

Davies’s (2024) thoroughness makes this review possible. It is precisely because he documents the period 2019–2023 with such forensic care that the insights offered here could be drawn from his work. This review has attempted to write what that work, by its own terms, leaves open: the chapter that places Black and Muslim young people not at the margins of the story of English youth work, but at its centre. Not because their experience is representative of all young people — it is not — but because it is the experience that most sharply tests the claims that open youth work makes about itself. If youth work is genuinely open, voluntary, relational, and on the side of young people, then what has happened to Black and Muslim communities over the period Davies documents is not a footnote. When a major report by Demos proceeds without any analysis disaggregated by faith or ethnicity (Gamote and Hyman, 2025), it signals that the silence is not accidental but structural and ideological. Invisibility in research becomes invisibility in policy, and then in practice, with its associated resource and impact distribution. The young people most likely to have been failed by the decade Davies documents are the least likely to appear in the evidence base that will shape what comes next. A Youth Strategy serious about reversing the damage of the last decade must begin by reading this book — and then choosing, with full knowledge of what that commitment requires, to write an account in which we can all see ourselves.